Hail and strong winds lash Victoria’s Alpine Region

Wild weather has continued to lash Victoria with storms hitting the state's Alpine Region.

Transcript

00:00 This wild weather has continued in Victoria to start 2024. Overnight a very damaging stormfront

00:08 has hit Victoria's high country, the Alpine region. It's brought heavy rain, very damaging

00:14 winds and lightning. The residents there, some have described it as cyclonic conditions

00:21 for a very, very brief period of time. The vision that you're seeing right now is from

00:25 the small town of Tawonga. Residents there have described over a 15 minute period, really

00:31 cyclonic conditions that hit the town and hit a number of other towns nearby. There

00:36 was also a concerning incident nearby at Freeburg at the tourist park there, where a tree has

00:42 come down on campers and it sent four people to hospital. The SES has spoken about this

00:48 just a short time ago. Take a listen.

00:50 I think when you look at a typical storm cell that we get at this time of the year that

00:54 comes through these valleys, they have an enormous punch in a very small area. On this

00:59 occasion, when we left Bright, it's approximately a 12 kilometre drive to where the casualties

01:04 were injured. The amount of devastation along the way was quite significant. We were aware

01:09 when we arrived on scene that this could potentially escalate into a much larger job because there

01:13 were that many trees down across the actual park itself. So we quickly deployed some additional

01:19 crews to make a sweep of the park to check that there was no other people trapped or

01:22 injured at the time.

01:23 Now today, the clean-up continues. The SES says it received more than 250 calls for assistance

01:30 over the last 24 hours. Many of that, more than half of them, were in the Hume region,

01:37 that alpine region, for trees down, buildings damaged, some flash flooding as well. But

01:43 as I said, the clean-up continues today. There are still a number of road closures, particularly

01:48 around the Kiwa Valley region, which is hampering efforts and this is in the middle of the two

01:53 tourist peak season as well. So there are lots of campers and hikers in the region.

01:58 It's creating a lot of difficulty at the time.

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